The postwar relationship between West German and American historians unfolded under different circumstances, as the latter were not acting as an intellectual occupation authority. Nevertheless, American scholars wondered about the Germans’ reintegration into the international scholarly community. The émigré Felix Gilbert, now teaching at Bryn Mawr College, argued in 1947 that it would not be “easy for German historiography to regain a place in the world of international scholarship.” Discerning “a number of factors that place[d] the revival of German historiographical activity under a severe handicap,” he concluded: “It would appear that German historiography will have to make an entirely new beginning, the results of which will hardly become apparent in the near future.”3 Gilbert also identified the neglect of social and economic developments as a longstanding deficiency of German historiography. Gilbert’s strong critique owed some of its force to the time when it was written. Several decades later, Gilbert almost fondly recalled his student days in 1920s Berlin.4 Nevertheless, his earlier assessments implicitly raised the question of what the task of American historians of Germany should be in the postwar years: were they to assume the role of attentive observers of German historiographical production or to act as active participants in a reemerging transatlantic scholarly community? Should they perhaps even provide intellectual “developmental aid” to their German colleagues and thus help establish a more critical historiography?
How American historians dealt with these questions is at the center of this chapter. It surveys the field of modern German history in the United States, examining its institutional, personal, and interpretive dimensions. The chapter thus begins with a discussion of the Conference Group for Central European History and the journals that published articles and book reviews on modern Germany. It then focuses on those departments with a strong presence in German history, where future historians of Germany received their training. Within this institutional context, the chapter explores the impact of first- and second-generation émigré historians.5 In addition, the chapter evaluates the interpretive contours of postwar historiography on Germany and illustrates changes in the way scholars wrote about modern Germany after the 1940s. All of these transformations unfolded at a time when the impact of National Socialism and the early Cold War drastically increased American scholarly and public interest in Germany.
For contemporary observers, American historians’ interest in Germany was not a forgone conclusion: in his presidential address at the annual convention of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1945, Carlton J. Hayes had demanded increased American attention to European history. Hayes deplored the small number of dissertations written in European—in comparison to American—history and thought it to be “astonishing and paradoxical” that at a time when the United States had abandoned its economic and military isolationism it should “keep alive and actually intensify an intellectual isolationism.”6
The international focus adopted and maintained by American history departments in the next decades reveals that this “intellectual isolationism” indeed receded. German history remained less well represented than British, French, and Russian history, but after 1945 history departments of many major universities hired historians specializing in modern Germany.7 In addition, the émigré historians diversified the field; and while some of them started their American careers at institutions with heavy teaching loads, they eventually managed to move to universities where they also advised graduate students and thus exerted greater influence on the discipline’s development.
The Institutional Context
The landscape of academic institutions in the United States differed significantly from that in Germany. The academic prestige of German universities varied; a PhD received at the University of Berlin or Heidelberg was—and may still be—considered more prestigious than the same degree from the University of Hamburg or Stuttgart. In addition, appointments at Technische Hochschulen or Technische Universitäten (institutes of technology) were less coveted than at “regular” universities. Yet the distinction between colleges and graduate schools has never existed in the German system, and it has been possible to complete a PhD in history at almost every university. By contrast, the American university system is characterized by a significantly greater variety of institutions with very different academic foci. The following therefore surveys PhD-granting institutions with specialists in German history, who produced widely read studies on modern Germany, trained future generations of historians, and were regarded by their German colleagues as representing the American historical profession.
During the first half of the twentieth century, male, white, and Protestant scholars dominated the discipline. While the academic landscape also included Catholic as well as historically black institutions, the profession’s most influential figures did not reflect the country’s ethnic and religious diversity. Rather, they often displayed cultural and ethnic biases rampant in American society. As John L. Harvey has illustrated, prejudices against Eastern Europeans, Jews, and African Americans, as well as the French, were very common and affected the professional prospects of these scholars.8 Even émigrés who ultimately pursued very successful careers in the United States initially encountered these obstacles. When Hans Rosenberg in 1935 turned to William Langer for assistance in securing employment in the United States, Langer replied: “Painful though it may be to you, I ought also to say that there is not a little anti-Semitic feeling here. It goes back a long way and is not the result of recent developments. But we have always had great difficulty in placing young Jews in academic positions.”9 After the Columbia University undergraduate Carl Schorske in the late 1930s expressed his desire to embark upon an academic career, the literary scholar Lionel Trilling, who himself had experienced anti-Semitism, “almost exploded at [Schorske]. What a folly to embark as a half-Jew, upon an academic career in the midst of the depression.”10 And John Hope Franklin witnessed anti-Semitism at Harvard in the early 1940s. After he nominated his fellow graduate student and later immigration history pioneer Oscar Handlin as an officer of the Henry Adams Club, “there was dead silence in the room. Eventually, one of the members spoke up and said that although Oscar did not have some of the more objectionable Jewish traits, he was still a Jew.”11
The enormous expansion of higher education in the United States after World War II helped diversify the historical profession.12 Between 1940 and 1970, the overall number of professorships in history increased fivefold, and AHA membership rose by 60 percent during the 1940s, again during the 1950s, and by over 90 percent in the 1960s. In the 1930s, about 150 history PhDs were awarded annually; by the mid-1950s the number had grown to 350. A decade later, it stood at 600. According to Peter Novick, during the postwar decades “academic hiring became more meritocratic and more universalistic.”13 Discrimination against Jewish historians declined, and in 1953, Louis Gottschalk served as the first Jewish president of the AHA. The class background of history graduate students and subsequently professors diversified as well. On the other hand, the percentage of women in the profession dropped remarkably: whereas women had received 20 percent of history doctorates between the 1920s and 1940s, by the 1950s their number had dropped to 10 percent.
As already indicated, after the end of the war the focus of American historians of Europe shifted. With much of the Continent lying in ruins, “American historians set busily to work to find out what had gone wrong.”14 Consequently, German history assumed greater relevance, and more and more history departments employed at least one specialist of modern Germany. By the mid-1960s, the demise of the colonial empires shifted the historiographical focus again, this time away from Europe, though this would not affect hiring patterns for a few decades. While the absolute number of historians of Europe hired continued to rise into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the proportion of historians of